The Home Phoneline Networking Association (HomePNA) is a consortium of communications companies that develop technologies for providing data communications over existing telephone wires inside a home or small office (SOHO).
The HomePNA Specification 2.0 (HPNA-2) is a standards document describing the second generation of such technology. It describes media access control (MAC) using an asynchronous priority-based protocol. The protocol uses carrier sense multiple access/collision detection (CSMA/CD) techniques to arbitrate access to the media together with a special signaling protocol used to resolve media collisions.
An HPNA-2 SOHO environment is unable to provide quality of service (QoS) guarantees at the level required by modern services such as, for example, telephony, video, audio, and future applications. It will be desirable that future generations of HPNA technology will be able to provide QoS guarantees at the level required by such modern services. Moreover, it will be desirable that some of these future generations will be interoperable with nodes operating based on HPNA-2.
It will be appreciated that for simplicity and clarity of illustration, elements shown in the figures have not necessarily been drawn to scale. For example, the dimensions of some of the elements may be exaggerated relative to other elements for clarity. Further, where considered appropriate, reference numerals may be repeated among the figures to indicate corresponding or analogous elements.